Texting while walking in New Jersey could soon land you a $50 fine or 15 days in jail. Type "new jersey texting and walking law" into Google to pull up different news articles on the topic.

I'd like to see what the forum thinks about this.

Firstly, I can see the merits of both sides of the argument, but I solidly land in the "Okay, this is a bad idea for a law" camp, and I say this as someone who ardently believes that texting while driving deserves to be a highly illegal offense in every state. Before I make my case or play Devil's advocate, I'd like to see what you folks have to say.

I'm not in the US, but the amount of times I've upgraded my traffic status in the UK to 'road-using pedestrian'/'honorary cyclist' because the UK branches of the dawdle-squad and the standing-in-the-way-brigade are just dithering in the middle of the pavement because apparently they, unlike me, have nowhere to be more urgently than requires a constant speed of 0.000001 mph. The elderly, pushchair-operators, the disabled and the people with big heavy shit to carry get a pass because it's ultimately probably not their fault they're in that situation. Just stopping, however, because ooh ding I got a text is not an acceptable reason to slow down the whole street, which absolutely is the consequence in my rickety-ass part of the world; the pavements are basically only wide enough to accommodate two people abreast -provided they don't mind sharing personal space, neither has belongings, and neither has a BMI that might raise their dietician's eyebrow. Alternatively, try it in my metropolitan-ass other parts of the world (London and Amsterdam) where everybody is trying to get everywhere all the time and frankly the pavements aren't much wider.

I have no idea how that law is possibly enforceable, but if they're going to give it a go, I have a few other seemingly-unlikely laws that could really help, which I'd like to propose.

• People take tests to see whether they are efficient pedestrians. This does not disqualify people that pass the test from using pavements, but those who do pass get issued cattleprods.
• Everybody is on roller-skates. Pushing is acceptable.
• Cars regulations are inverted so that they pump out as many toxic chemicals as possible, giving pedestrians a bit of extra encouragement to get to their destination more quickly.
• Moron-bumps are installed so that people who aren't looking where they're going trip and learn a valuable lesson. Ideally, these should be slow but increasingly-steep inclines so that pedestrians are encouraged to take a bit of a run-up, thereby increasing the speed of everybody's day.
• Jig-lanes, complete with red carpet, are installed onto every stretch of pavement globally, for my personal use. In this circumstance, I'd still actually like a cattleprod in order to discourage people from disobeying the system.

Note that many of these proposals would actually inconvenience me more than if dithery-ass mouth-breathers stopped being dithery-ass mouth-breathers and walked to where they were going at an acceptable pace without randomly swerving, failing to indicate, or abruptly stopping for no good reason, yet, out of charity, I'm willing to compromise.

Am in the military, this is already a thing. Not the end of the world, just step off to the side for thirty goddamn seconds while you take a phone call.

Hell, I do it out of habit now.

People are too stupid to take care of themselves. You stupid right? Let me take that pesky internet from you, you can get harassed on it. To keep my sarcasm short. The idea is stupid. <.<

This sounds like the type of thing states pass because they figure they can collect money from it and get away with it because it is such an unpopular thing to do. I've never been into the stand and deliver style of collection, and it seems a tad amazing this is considered an issue, so I can't say I'm behind it. Especially when you consider the negative effect of this - jaywalking - is already an offense of its own.